‘Thrilled with Chilly Horror’: A Formulaic Pattern in Gothic Fiction
PDF

Keywords

collocation
equivalence
field
formula
formulaic pattern
Gothic fiction
horror
overpatterning
ritualization
visibility

How to Cite

Aguirre, M. (2015). ‘Thrilled with Chilly Horror’: A Formulaic Pattern in Gothic Fiction. Studia Anglica Posnaniensia, 49(2), 105–123. https://doi.org/10.2478/stap-2014-0010

Abstract

There is currently no literature on the topic of formulaic language in Gothic prose fiction. The article resorts to a modified understanding of the term ‘collocation’ as used in lexicography and corpus linguistics to identify the significant co-occurrence of two or more words in proximity. It also draws on insights from the Theory of Oral-Formulaic Composition, in particular as concerns the use of the term ‘formula’ in traditional epic poetry, though again some modifications are required by the nature of Teuthold’s text. The article differentiates between formula as a set of words which appear in invariant or near-invariant collocation more than once, and a formulaic pattern, a rather more complex, open system of collocations involving lexical and other fields. The article isolates a formulaic pattern—that gravitating around the node-word ‘horror’, a key word for the entire Gothic genre –, defines its component elements and structure within the book, and analyses its thematic importance. Key to this analysis are the concepts of overpatterning, ritualization, equivalence and visibility.

https://doi.org/10.2478/stap-2014-0010
PDF

References

Aguirre, Manuel. 1990. The closed space: Horror literature and western symbolism. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Aguirre, Manuel. 2007. The thresholds of the tale: Liminality and the structure of fairytales. Madrid: The Gateway Press.

Aguirre, Manuel. 2013a. Gothic fiction and folk-narrative structure: The case of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Gothic Studies 15(2). 1-18.

Aguirre, Manuel. 2013b. A grammar of Gothic: Report on a research project on the forms of the Gothic genre. Romantic Textualities: Literature and Print Culture, 1780-1840, 21. http://www.romtext.org.uk/reports/rt21_n07/ (date of access: 27 July 2014).

Aguirre, Manuel. 2014. Mary Robinson's 'The Haunted Beach' and the grammar of Gothic. Neophilologus 98(2). 1-16.

Aguirre, Manuel. 2015 (in press). 'The tranquillity of the mansion': Fields and formulaic diction in a Gothic novel. Journal of Language, Literature and Culture 62(3).

Bell, Catherine. 1992. Ritual theory, ritual practice. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Bolinger, Dwight L. 1952. Linear modification. PMLA 67(7). 1117-1144.

Botting, Fred. 1996. Gothic. London: Routledge.

Botting, Fred. 2009. Horror. In Marie Mulvey-Roberts (ed.), The handbook of the Gothic (2nd edn), 184-192. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan.

Burke, Edmund. 1757 (1987). A philosophical enquiry into the origin of our ideas of the sublime and beautiful, ed. J.T. Boulton. London: Blackwell. Clery, Emma J. 2000. Women's Gothic from Clara Reeve to Mary Shelley (2nd edn.). Horndon, Tavistock: Northcote House.

Curtius, Ernst R. 1948 (1979). European literature and the Latin Middle Ages, transl. W.R. Trask. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Derrida, Jacques. 1967. De la grammatologie. Paris: Éditions de Minuit.

Downing, Angela & Philip Locke. 2002. A university course in English grammar. London: Routledge.

Fillmore, Charles. 1968. The case for case. In Emmon Bach & Robert T. Harms (eds.), Universals in linguistic theory, 1-88. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston.

Fincher, Max. 2013. Terror. In William Hughes, David Punter & Andrew Smith (eds.) The encyclopedia of the Gothic (2 vols.), 683-686. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.

Firth, John Rupert. 1957. A synopsis of linguistic theory, 1930-1955. In Studies in Linguistic Analysis, ed. by the Philological Society, 1-32. Oxford: Blackwell.

Foley, John Miles. 1988. The theory of oral composition: History and methodology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Foley, John Miles. 1990. Traditional oral epic: The Odyssey, Beowulf, and the Serbo-Croatian return song. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Fry, Donald K. 1967. Old English formulas and systems. English Studies 48. 193-204.

Gluckman, Max. 1962. Les rites de passage. Essays on the ritual of social relations. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Goffman, Erving. 1974. Frame analysis: An essay on the organization of experience. Boston: Northeastern University Press.

Hall, Daniel. 2000. The Gothic tide: Schauerroman and Gothic novel in the late eighteenth century. In Susanne Stark (ed.), The novel in Anglo-German context: Cultural crosscurrents and affinities, 51-60. Amsterdam: Rodopi.

Hoey, Michael. 1991. Patterns of lexis in text. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hoey, Michael. 2000. A world beyond collocation: New perspectives on vocabulary teaching. In Michael Lewis (ed.), Teaching collocation: Further developments in the lexical approach, 224-245. Hove: Language Teaching Publications.

Hughes, William. 2013. Historical dictionary of Gothic literature. Lanham/Toronto/Plymouth: The Scarecrow Press.

Huxley, Julian. 1914. The courtship-habits of the great crested grebe (Podiceps cristatus); with an addition to the theory of sexual selection. In Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London 35. 491-562.

Huxley, Julian. 1966. Ritualization of behaviour in animals and man. In International study of the main trends of research in the sciences of man. UNESCO archives SS/41/3.244.1/h/13 http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0015/001560/156054eb.pdf (date of access: 6 April 2014).

Jakobson, Roman. 1960 (1987). Linguistics and poetics. In Krystyna Pomorska & Stephen Rudy (eds.), Language in literature, 62-94. Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press.

Kahlert, Karl Friedrich (a.k.a. Lorenz Flammenberg). 1792. Der Geisterbanner. Eine Wundergeschichte aus mündlichen und schriftlichen Traditionen. Hohenzollern: Johann Baptist Wallishausser. http://vd18.de/id/18163777 (date of access: 28 February 2014).

Kristeva, Julia. 1968. Problèmes de la structuration du texte. In Roland Barthes, Jacques Dérrida & Michél Foucault (eds.) Théorie d'ensemble, 297-317. Paris: Seuil.

Langacker, Ronald W. 1987-91. Foundations of cognitive grammar (2 vols.). Stanford, Cal.: Stanford University Press.

Lord, Albert B. 1960. The singer of tales. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.

Louw, Bill. 1993. Irony in the text or insincerity in the writer? The diagnostic potential of semantic prosodies. In Mona Baker, Gill Francis, & Elena Tognini-Bonelli (eds.), Text and technology, 157-176. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Matthiessen, Christian & M. A. K. Halliday. 1997. Systemic functional grammar: A first step into the theory. Beijing: Higher Education Press.

Murnane, Barry. 2010. Uncanny translations, uncanny productivity: Walpole, Schiller and Kahlert. In Stephanie Stockhorst (ed.) Cultural transfer through translation: The circulation of enlightened thought in Europe by means of translation, 141-165. Amsterdam: Rodopi.

Nadel, Siegfried F. 1954 (1970). Nupe religion: Traditional beliefs and the influence of Islam in a West African chiefdom. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Napier, Elizabeth R. 1987. The failure of Gothic: Problems of disjunction in an eighteenth-century literary form. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Parry, Milman. 1930. Studies in the epic technique of oral verse-making. I: Homer and Homeric style. Harvard Studies in Classical Philology 41. 73-147.

Punter, David. 1980. The literature of terror: A history of Gothic fictions from 1765 to the present day. London: Longmans.

Ranger, Paul. 1991. 'Terror and pity reign in every breast': Gothic drama in the London patent theatres, 1750-1820. London: The Society for Theatre Research.

Sadleir, Michael. 1927. The Northanger novels: A footnote to Jane Austen. London: Oxford University Press.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. 1981. The character in the veil: Imagery of the surface in the Gothic novel. PMLA 96. 255-70.

Shklovsky, Viktor. 1917 (1965). Art as technique. In Russian formalist criticism: Four essays, 324. transl. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis. Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press.

Sinclair, John. 1991. Corpus, concordance, collocation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Sinclair, John. 2004. Trust the text: Language, corpus and discourse. London: Routledge.

Teuthold, Peter (transl.). 1794. The necromancer: or The tale of the Black Forest: Founded on facts. Translated from the German of Lawrence Flammenberg. In two volumes. London: Minerva-Press.

Thompson, Gary Richard (ed.). 1979. Introduction to Romantic Gothic tales, 1790-1840. New York: Harper and Row.

Thomson, Douglass H. 2002. Jane Austen and the Northanger novelists. In D. H. Thomson, Jack G. Voller & Frederick S. Frank (eds.) Gothic writers: A critical and bibliographical guide, 33-47. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

Waugh, Linda R. 1980. The poetic function in the theory of Roman Jakobson. Poetics Today 2(1a). 57-82.

Wray, Alison. 2005. Formulaic language and the lexicon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.